Train cash: same old, same old

By

Published on: 5/11/2011

Of course it's payback that Wisconsin got snubbed when the Obama administration divvied up $2 billion in train booty. Wisconsin said no to the administration's grander, gauzier rail dreams, embarrassing the president, so of course Wisconsin gets nothing now. This is how things work. It should surprise no one.

Unless, that is, you'd mistakenly thought you'd voted for change in how the country does politics.

Sorry: Politics is as it ever was, which is why federal Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was passing out $2 billion this week. It was money Florida didn't want to start a rail line it couldn't afford. Its governor said no after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker managed to quash a proposed $810-million-for-starters Milwaukee-to-Madison train that would average 69 mph and need endless taxpayer subsidies.

Spend the billions instead to fix crumbling bridges? Just save it? Don't be silly: LaHood made a show of redistributing that cash to other train projects, just to teach Wisconsinites and, now, Floridians that their frugality is futile.

And when Walker sought $150 million for new trains to improve long-established, well-used train service from Milwaukee to Chicago, LaHood had his revenge: Money would go to "reliable people," he said, to states that buy into the dream. Places that elect uppity penny-pinchers? Get lost.

"So much for evidence-based public policy," said Samuel Staley, transport scholar for the free-market Reason Foundation. If the Obama administration really wants high-speed rail grabbing a larger share of short-haul intercity traffic, the Milwaukee-Chicago Hiawatha line would have been a natural. It serves close, established markets, draws increasing numbers of passengers, is actually competitive on speed, and its $26 per-passenger subsidy is low by Amtrak standards - meaning the line comes close to making some kind of economic sense.

Of the $2 billion, about $800 million went to improve similar existing service in the Washington-Boston corridor. Why nothing for Wisconsin? Said Staley, "It smells like political payback." An electorate and its governor will pay for their attitude.

Again, dog bites man, though I do think the snubbing of the sensible Hiawatha reveals something: For the Obama administration, trains are less about transportation and more about transformation.

Running more trains from Milwaukee to Chicago, which is what Walker wanted, is about improving transportation. It would make life easier - but not very different.

The train to Madison, on the other hand, was explicitly about changing how people get to and fro; it was meant to turn us into a train-taking state and to make Madison, well, sophisticated. The eventual extension to Minneapolis was not simply adding the option of taking a train - Amtrak already runs that route - but was meant in large measure to replace cars and airplanes, changing travel patterns on a large scale.

Do not forget, this is an administration with an energy secretary who envies European gas prices, a transportation secretary who embraces policy to "coerce people out of their cars" and a president whose answer to high gas prices is to suggest a $48,000 electric auto with a 28-mile range.

Transformational indeed. Obama promised change, but it is you who will undergo it. In 2008, you were electing a whole new you.

You were hoping instead that Washington would change? Not quite. The deficit's rising, Gitmo's open and a trillion dollars in stimulus was all about preserving the public sector, which now consumes a much larger share of the nation's output. Unemployment, meanwhile, remains at 9%.

Or was it politics that would be different? Obama now wants any company doing business with the government to reveal what it or its key employees personally give to any group weighing in on political issues. Contractors will want to bear in mind LaHood's phrase, "reliable people."

Now there's the train money, with blowback for states that don't toe the line. It's standard stick-and-carrot politics, elevated not one millimeter from what's always prevailed. Sorry if you thought you'd voted to change that.